Metro Pulse/Cover/The Football Issue

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Introduction

Guys & Vols
Brooks Clark's annual predictions for the season to come.

Then Again...
Eh, what does that Brooks guy know, anyway? Adrienne Martini and Joey Cody offer the 2000 Chicks' Picks.

Blue-Bloods

Managing Success
Matthew T. Everett talks to the man behind the curtain.

The Fizzicks of Football
Jesse Fox Mayshark explodes the myth that academics and football don't mix.

Fresh Titan fans give Orange faithful a run for their money

by Mike Gibson

Mike Keith's voice was taut, fraught with an almost desperate expectation as he set the play, the kick-off following a Buffalo Bills touchdown, the kick and ensuing run-back that would almost certainly punctuate the Tennessee Titans' 1999 season with a forlorn period. In this, the second of two AFC Wildcard play-off games, the Titans were down 16-15, with the better part of a football field separating them from victory, and a mere 16 seconds left to traverse the distance.

"Do the Titans have a miracle left in them in what has been a magical season to this point?" Keith shrilled, presciently. "If they do, they need it now."

Then he and color commentator Pat Ryan watched as Buffalo specialist Doug Christie booted a high, short kick, fielded by the Titans' Lorenzo Neal at the 25 yard line. But rather than lurching down the field in headlong desperation, Neal unhesitatingly swiveled and pitched the ball to burly Titans tight end Frank Wycheck. Wycheck, in turn, side-stepped and launched a bullet, a hard, airtight spiral to the far left side of the field and an expectant Kevin Dyson, the lithe, dizzingly fast wide receiver acquired by the Titans in 1998.

"He's got something," Ryan's voice tremoloed, rising with a tangible excitement as the Titans speedster set off down the sideline and an inviting stretch of bright green real estate left suddenly unattended by the too-zealous Buffalo defenders, all of whom had converged on the point on the field where Neal had accepted the kick.

"He's got it; he's got it!" Ryan fairly shouted, as Keith counted in ever-crescendoing five-yard increments the yardage Dyson was devouring with impossibly long strides.

In mere moments—the thoughtless flickering of an eye—Dyson had traveled the entire 75 yards, storming into the end zone and leaving hapless Bills defenders strewn across the field like so many pick-up sticks.

"There—are—no—flags—on—the field!" Keith screamed, in a voice so feverish and piercing that East Tennessee fans accustomed to his former role as the unflappable host of the Vol Network call-in radio show would scarcely have thought it possible. "It's a miracle!"

A Music City Miracle, to be sure. The improbable kickoff return not only propelled the Tennessee Titans through the AFC playoffs and into the 2000 Super Bowl, it marked a coming-of-age, of sorts; for the Tennessee Titans (née Houston Oilers) football team; for Knoxville native Keith as an NFL broadcaster; and for the Titans organization in its emergence as a powerful sports and marketing entity in a state steeped in college football tradition.

"It's been a fantastic experience, seeing what it was and where it's come from through to this point," says Keith, who left his position as a local broadcasting favorite with Knoxville's WNOX 99.1 FM/990 AM in 1998 to become radio commentator and director of broadcasting for the Titans organization. "It's an interesting change, from sitting just as a member of the media to being on the inside and seeing how things work."

Keith and Ryan were widely recognized for their precise but fiercely animated call of the miracle play. "I didn't think much about our role in it," says Keith. "Then later that evening at a restaurant, I noticed they were playing our audio along with the television replays. I thought at that point, 'This could be big for us.'"

It was. Keith's phone machine was flooded with messages in the coming days, and he and Ryan were interviewed more than 150 times in the weeks before the Titans/St. Louis Rams Super Bowl. Keith was also lauded by national broadcast veterans, and was afforded the chance to meet several of his personal heroes, including former New York Giants quarterback-turned-analyst Phil Simms.

The Music City Miracle provided a delirious surge of adrenaline to what was already a focused and powerful effort by the Titans to make the former Houston Oilers a team Tennesseans would embrace. When the franchise changed locales two years ago, stuck in a quagmire of successive break-even seasons, initial fan response was less than heartening. Compounding the franchise's difficulties was the team's status as NFL vagabonds, playing a series of listlessly attended games in Memphis before moving on to Nashville and the Vanderbilt University stadium.

Then in 1999, the Titans completed their long-anticipated new home facility, an 80,000-square-foot sports palace that included the 68,000-seat Adelphia Coliseum, three additional practice fields, and perhaps the best training facilities in the NFL. Keith notes that when former UT wide receiver Carl Pickens—recently acquired from the hapless Cincinnati Bengals—first visited the newly-christened Baptist Sports Park, "he thought he'd died and gone to Heaven."

This newfound sense of place portended great things to come. The rejuvenated Titans fielded a young, eager squad anxious to realize the potential held long in abeyance by organizational uncertainties and nomadic ways. Anchored by a brawny rushing attack and an athletic, highly opportunistic defense, the Titans navigated a 13-3 regular season that included a perfect record at Adelphia.

In the meantime, the Titans' off-the-field staff had engineered a series of promotional efforts and community outreach programs intended to make the team more accessible to its adopted fan base.

"From the beginning, we realized we needed to be visible, accessible, and service-oriented," Keith says. "We felt the people weren't against us, but they weren't necessarily for us either. We had to get off the apathy shelf and into people's hearts. It was a campaign."

That campaign included philanthropic endeavors such as the Titans Charitable Foundation, seeded by $500,000 of the organization's money; an exhaustive program of travel-and-lobby efforts all over the state, conducted by Keith and other staff members; and the Titans Caravan, an unwieldy, logo-adorned Camper's Corner RV that has made 135 stops in roughly two years, carting popular Titans players to promotional gatherings all over the Southeast. (Its Knoxville and Chattanooga stops, says Keith, were its best-attended.)

Those efforts, and the team's winning ways, paid off. The Titans have sold out all home tickets for the '00 season, including an increase of 8,000 permanent seat licenses over '99. And the increased response on the Titans network post-game call-in show, says Keith, has been nothing short of phenomenal.

"At certain points of the season, the Titans outdo the Vols, which I never thought would happen," says Bill King, sports director of Nashville's WLAC, the city's flagship UT football station. "They've greatly exceeded everyone's expectations, even (Titans owner) Bud Adams'. Bumper stickers everywhere, jerseys everywhere. They've transcended the disparate loyalties of different college fans."

And the phenomenon hasn't been relegated to the western half of the state. "It's turned around 180 degrees from the way the Titans were perceived early on, as a second-hand team from Houston that couldn't make up its mind," says Knoxville's Dave Hooker, a producer and sports reporter at WNOX. "We get far more Titans questions on our call-in show and at station remotes than we used to. A lot of East Tennesseans resented the idea that the Titans could somehow come in and have an instant fan base. The Buffalo game made a big difference in changing that."

The growth in fandom has translated into dollar signs—lots of them—for Titans merchandisers. Nashville's David Singleton, who founded The Tennessee Sports Fan, a licensed retail outfit, in 1996, attributes roughly 80 percent of his store's explosive growth (he now owns five outlets in the Music City area, with $11 million in annual sales) to the Titans.

"We were all-Vol when we started, and we giggled at the notion that we might sell more NFL stuff," says Singleton, who claims his company has moved more Vol merchandise than any retail outfit in the state over the last two years. "But that has absolutely happened. We probably sell three times as much Titans as Vols stuff now, and that's conservative. If UT loses to Florida, their sales absolutely die.

"We did more than twice as much business after the AFC championship game than we did after UT's 1998 national championship. About 30 percent of this city supports UT; 80 percent support the Titans."

In East Tennessee, Dave Hooker (father of the aforementioned reporter) is co-owner of United Sales, a Lenoir City outfit that sells Vols and Titans merchandise to general retail outlets, convenience stores, and gift shops as far west as Cookeville. Going into October of '99, he says, sales of Titans merchandise "were pretty nonexistent.

"Nearing playoff time, they exploded," he says. I couldn't believe how fast products flew off the shelves."

Though primarily college-oriented, Hooker's outfit offers a near-astounding array of Titans products, standards and oddities alike; hats, shirts, window clings, footballs, flags, garbage cans, rugs, welcome mats...even a Titans "snack helmet," a tail-gate sine qua non in the form of a plastic football helmet designed to hold potato chips and dip. Since the beginning of last season, the gap in his Vols-to-Titans sales ratio has narrowed from 95-5 to nearly 60-40.

"In March, the public was still waiting (for Titans merchandise)," Hooker says. "It hasn't slowed. And as we make more inroads with the pro merchandise manufacturers, I expect the ratio to get even closer."

Another stellar season wouldn't hurt, either, and according to the younger Dave in the Hooker clan, the Titans are shrewdly engineered for long-term success. Even the team's back-up quarterback, veteran Neil O'Donnell, would likely start for 10 of the NFL's 31 teams, Hooker says.

More importantly, young linchpin players such as versatile quarterback Steve McNair, a preternaturally adept runner and rifle-armed passer, and fifth-year running back Eddie George, a six-foot-three, 240-pound graven mound of mobile destruction, have been re-signed to lucrative long-term contracts. And with rookie contracts binding new players to their teams for at least three years, the same can be said of Jevon Kearse, the rangy steel coil of a defensive end who as a rookie in 1999 almost single-handedly transformed the Titans defense with his 14.5 sacks and 11 forced fumbles.

Since the team's heart-rending Super Bowl loss to the St. Louis Rams, which saw Dyson's reaching arm thrust the football a mere yard short of a tying touchdown in the game's last second, Hooker points out that the team has aggressively shored up its weaknesses by adding Pro Bowler Pickens to its corps of wide receivers, and by replacing solid but unspectacular middle linebacker Barron Wortham with former Dallas Cowboys up-and-comer Randall Godfrey, a young gun who registered nearly 60 more tackles in '99 than his Titans counterpart.

The maneuvers are indicative of the team's strategies both on and off the field, says Hooker, of its determination to realize the inseparably intertwined objectives of winning football and ardent fan support.

Still, Hooker admits, serendipity can't be discounted as an integral component of the Titans' ascension from the depths of rootlessness and mediocrity. "If it hadn't been for one of the flukiest plays in NFL history," he laughs, "we wouldn't be having this discussion."